Two larmed and a lert went out with a dept To waander the Seussian plains! To look at the hill where the Daptive slept, And the caves of Ssociate rraigns. Says the dept to the lert, I'll tell ya lads, With bandon, I'll proudly say, This life which we lead 'most perfect would be, If only we had an A.

Wading in from soggy Texas. Here I worried my sister's vacation to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina was going to be spoiled by a hurricane. They waited a day or two then were able to head out. I told her she should come to Texas instead, but just as well she didn't. We got all of the rain.

There's a birds nest dangling on a branch outside my office window. Someone check and see if MOM still has that bird's nest collection out in the laundry room? I'll trim this one out of the tree if she want's it (it's kind of woven around several branches and has an entry hole on the bottom side of it. Looks like something the National Geographic would write about in a scrubby tree on the African veldt).

Dear MOM, As you know, I'm on the selection committee for Idaho's Book of the Year award. I just thought you'd like to know that as I was just about to compose a poem about the 18th letter of the alphabet for my siblings, an email from the committee came through and my brain took a detour into Libraryish poetical musings. So, if you know these obscure books, which of course YOU do, you'll know who won first prize and honorable mention. I'll have to write the other poem another time.

If any of you would like to see it, the new bookmobile (sans shelves, yet) is parked out in the south parking lot. I, yes, I, drove it all around town yesterday and backed it into its present spot where it awaits new shelves. I didn't squish too many people in the process.

I arrive at BWI on Thursday, September 30, at 7:55 p.m. I will spend that night in a nearby motel, which is TBD. I depart BWI on Monday, October 4, at 1:45 p.m., which means I have to be there by 12:45.

See? I really did it. And I decided against the Sousaphone, but I will be bringing the double bass AND my Steinway Concert Grand. I'm still undecided on the timpani: do I bring the set, or just the big one?

Gotta run, folks. I just got a message from that idiot LTC G. A. Custer. He's is some sort of deep shit up in the Little Big Horn area. Something about "all the Indians in the world" and "I made a big boo-boo" and "send help!" This will take a while, I think. I'll check in when I can.

Well, you know the old saying: One major battle, one ex-National Guardsman.

(The Legion saddled up and rode to his rescue, but I don't think he's in the Little Big Thirst Saloon.)

Custer was a lot like Inspector Clouseau, he "never refuse the challenge". ;-) Imagine his delight at catching all those Indians by surprise, all gathered in one place at the same time. Why, he couldn't have planned it better! He could see the presidency floating gently down into his outstretched hands, just like a bit of goosedown...

Now, I'm not sayin' I'm a better general or even Lieutenant Colonel than ol' George, but iffen my scouts said, "Jeez, man, there must be a couple thousand Indians over there" I sure as heck wouldn't divide my troops, like Gaul, into three parts. And I wouldn't send the troops with the ammunition off on a scout. In fact, I wouldn't even disobey orders -- I'd let my CO know what I'd found and just sit there and dig rifle pits and things.

Screw this "Bugler, sound the charge!" stuff. Man there's like 3,000 Indians out there and you're outnumbered better'n three to one in your whole regiment!

Sad news today. A young woman who was friends with my daughter throughout public school died at her own hand on Tuesday. I had a call this morning and my daughter will come down for the viewing and funeral. Why mention it on BS? Because her life was manipulated to pieces by the BS of fundamentalist church communities. Left alone, she may (or may not) have been unstable, but the church-like condolences offered on the online guest book annoy me no end. She isn't in a "better place." She is a dead 22-year-old girl. The mentality that says this is better than a full rich life is absurd and is what helped put her here.

Pardon me. I'll go take care of the weekend's business. I won't try to post a remark like this online in the obit because the eyeballs that scan these things won't let it through.

This is a grim statistic; I can only wonder how many promising lives we lose in a day or a year because of the insane meddling of unhinged belief-system merchants. Do they number in the thousands? If not mortally--how many are walking wounded from induced madness of enforced unreality?

On Sunday it will be 23,741 days since I was born, to my Other Mom. That's 101110010111101 in a binary system. If you are three-toed and slothful, it is 1012120022 in ternary. If you have only one hand it is 1224431 in quintal. If you're twice a square, then it is 56275 in octal, and if you an ubernerd the hex is 5CBD. It is also 2,051,222,400 seconds OR 34,187,040 minutes OR 569,784 hours of which I have spent about 130,00 wandering in dreamland.

My grandmother said I was nuffin' but a broiler. But what did she know? Look how I turned out!!! Well done!!!

You know what they say, Mom: you're only as old as you feel. I wish, though, that the damned clocks would stop arguing with me.

We talked to her brother, a friend of my son's, and as it happens, my son texted at that time that he wished he could be there, so I was able to hold it up for his friend, a kind of long-distance yet local condolence.

My daughter was one of the best high school friends of the young woman who died, and as we walked up to her mother I told Moonglow that she needed to simply let her Mom give her a big long hug and cry. Moonglow was going to be a surrogate for her friend at that moment in time. Yup.

Do you remember the Münchhausen-by-proxy mother in the film The Sixth Sense? The father wasn't as bad as that, he was wearing a light green shirt, not red, but I had never met him before and if he hadn't been pointed out I wouldn't have recognized him as the father of a dead child by his demeanor. He of the ultra-fundamentalist bent.

Tomorrow is the funeral. I'll get a big enough dose of BS there to last me for weeks, but I'll slough it off and come check up on MOM before much time passes.

A few glasses of wine and a good night's sleep and I think the unconscious has sorted through a lot. I will conclude that for as sad as everyone was yesterday, there was no surprise. I just wish it didn't seem like it was inevitable.

MOM had more wine than I did so is still snoring in there -- it may be a while before she reports back on what she dreamed.

It's a humid overcast day, and I think it's time to put the dog spa away for the year. Next one who sees MOM head out to the back yard ask if she wants me to siphon the water into the garden, around the trees, or just pour it there on the lawn near the stairs. You'll remember that last year when we did that she stepped into the mud and lost a shoe in the lawn. It turned up after the yard dried and froze this winter, but she couldn't ever make that shoe look as good as the mate to wear again.

Hmm, Rapaire has scorched a few books in his time, I mean burned. No! I mean stabbed and skewered with a sword. I know, I was there watching at the time. Not only that, but he was urging young children to do likewise. I think it was for Banned Books Week, and I believe there wad a copy of Sears Subject Headings, or maybe the Idaho Code of Law.

Stilly, maybe you could skewer and the scorch some of those BSers you were mentioning. Give 'em a taste of what it'll be like to burn.

As fer them hay-burning, cattle-shooting, spiteful, bile-rising children of dump dogs, why, they'll feel scorching soon enough. Gonna be good and hot, too, unless they find themselves all the way down in the ice, ending up as Dante described it down there. As for the YL, you'll likely meet her again in a place of fair weather and sunshine.

I imagine such souls--full of judgmental venom and icy confusions and fear-filled falsehoods--end up something like a lump of coal, perhaps living in the brain of a toad or the belly of a porcupine, incapable of more than fitful snuffling and defecating.